For Bernie

What is a great mentor? Someone who not only teaches but imparts; who not only shows his student how to master a specific craft, but how to be. Eleven years ago today, GQ correspondent Andrew Corsello lost his childhood piano teacher, Bernard Shaak. Five days later, Corsello delivered the following eulogy—a testament to everything a male-to-male mentor relationship can be

The day before yesterday, I was on the phone with a woman from United Airlines arranging to fly back to Denver from New York, where I live. I asked her if they had a special fare for a situation such as this. She said yes. She asked for some details. What is his name? His name is Bernard Shaak. What are the circumstances? I explained. And what, she asked, is your relationship to Mr. Shaak?

For a long moment, I sat mute with the receiver in my hand. Hers was a simple question, but an impossible one. What does one call such a relationship? How does one label it?

One doesn't. One only tries. I searched for the words, and the ones that came—I'm sure, I know—are the ones that come to many of you. Kids, teens, so-called adults like myself—there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of us, Bernie's legacy—who can say what I said to the airlines operator: "He is my fine friend. He is my mentor." It didn't occur to me until we'd hung up to mention that he was my piano teacher. It seemed secondary.

The last question the operator asked me: "How long have you known Mr. Shaak?" I did the math. Bernie came into my life when I was six; I'm 31 now: 25 years.

Twenty-five years. I, in fact, have few memories of my life without Bernie, the time before him. "Twenty-five years," I told the woman on the other end of the line, and realized as I said it that Bernie is my oldest friend.

How vivid, how visual, the memories are of the times after Bernie came onto the scene! I remember a sultry morning from June of 1973 in one of the Shaak practice rooms. I remember five other students and their mothers waiting patiently as some kid hacked his way through "Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater." I remember sitting atop that groovy horizontal fan, cooling my ankles, thinking, I want to play! Me! Me! Me! I remember Bernie, his antennae as always attuned to the frequency of children, turning to me with a knowing grin and saying, "Are you ready to play now, Andy?" I was. And I'm sure now that more Shaak students than you can shake a stick at share this memory with me.

I remember group lessons in the basement, where Tommy Weaver and I would turn games of musical chairs into scenes from Where the Wild Things Are. Flying around like monkeys, two-fisting those rubber-tipped mallets and whacking them on those exotic Toro-red hollow wood blocks. Whipping off glissandos on the xylophone and squealing over the shoulder, "F sharp! B flat! Harmonic minor!" to the questions Bernie was calling out from where he sat at the piano. I remember going beyond—well beyond—the call of duty in these endeavors, to the point where Bernie would be compelled to say, "Now, Andy, Andy, if you don't tone it down, I'm going to have to send you out back to sit in the alley with the pebbles." The pebbles! Nothing could be so dreadful as the pebbles, cold and gray. Bernie never made good on this threat, of course. He was so predisposed to find things funny—the way we kids found them funny—that it simply wasn't in his constitution to even think of punishment as a possible solution. That's the thing about him. He not only has a great musical imagination, but a childlike and slightly villainous sense of humor—the two are sides of the same coin when you think about it—and it is this quality precisely that makes him such a great teacher. It is also, incidentally, the quality he brought to his immortal original composition, "Ping Pong," with which so many of you are undoubtedly familiar.

And I do know now that had I ever been forced to take that long walk to the back alley, he'd have never let me go alone. Yesterday, I was over at South Milwaukee swapping stories. Jamie Shaak mentioned that during her period of adolescent disobedience, her "acting out" period, Bernie used to say to her, "Let's go out in the alley and throw stones." And they'd go together, chucking rocks until all the kinks were out. That's Bernie: In some families, you get sent to bed without any supper, grounded, maybe cuffed in the ear. With Bernie you get to throw stones. I tell you, the one thing that got me to sleep last night was running through my head the lovely image of Bernie and his youngest daughter out in the alley throwing stones until it was time to stop, until there was no longer the need to throw stones. His being there.

Back to that sense of humor—I remember Leslie Shaak, clad in her nightgown and turned into a zombie by codeine after the wholesale removal of her wisdom teeth, wandering from her bedroom into the room where Bernie and I were taking aim at the third Chopin Scherzo, bumping gently, face-first, into the wall, mumbling something unintelligible, then drifting back into her room. "Ah, yes, there's Leslie," Bernie said dryly, as if this were exactly what one should expect of Leslie Shaak, as if the whole Shaak clan were something conjured from the imagination of Edward Gory. "And there she goes!" he said, as his oldest daughter floated from view. Wicked, Bernie, wicked.

You see, Bernie was never a taskmaster—save a joke maneuver called "The Treatment," a kind of Vulcan nerve pinch on the shoulder used to "correct" sight reading gaffes. (Oddly enough, however, the Treatment was something you anticipated giddily, because you knew when you were receiving the Treatment that you had commanded Bernie's complete and undivided attention—and what could be finer than that?) He was never niggling with the music in a way so many teachers are. Bernie never killed your curiosity by forcing a piece of music to be just so. More important, in my twenty-five years with Bernie, I have never known him to be stern or threatening or unkind. Not once have I seen him utter an untruth, or raise his voice in anger. I've never seen him manipulate another student—or another person, for that matter. He has never used guilt as a motivator. Instead, he would give you a piece of music that was beyond your technical reach—the Ravel Sonatine, the Prokofiev Scherzo, any Chopin Étude—and exhort you to rise to it. And you always did. You always do. His greatest gift as a teacher is his ability always to create within his students the illusion that the inspiration comes solely from within—that wonderful feeling that I did it—I did.

Lord, he used to say the most wonderfully imaginative things about music. Of the coda on that third Chopin Scherzo, he'd say, "It's a ball of wool you throw and loose control of, Andy! Lose control!" Of the coda of Chopin's fourth Ballade, he'd say, "Don't make it too intelligible, Andy! It is an outburst of madness! An outburst of madness!" He spoke of the left hand part of the Revolutionary Étude as the brutal rumbling of a lawnmower blade, chewing up everything in its path. He spoke of the descending line at the end of Pinto's "Run, Run!" as a "waterfall of laughter." A waterfall of laughter. What a mind.

Incidentally, Bernie was always amused by my highly& interpretive memorizations of music. He'd take the suffix of my name—"...ello"—and attach it to whichever composer we'd be studying. I'd be playing through some Mozart variations and, without seeming the least bit displeased, he'd exclaim, "Ah, Mozello!" as he wrote it into my manuscript. "I know him well!" In my possession are stacks of sheet music marked "Chopinello," "Ravello," Prokofievello," "Scriabinello"...

Yet another Bernie Shaak memory I know many of you share: The wonderful Haydn D Major concerto. Even if I had never played the piece, that third movement is so ebullient, so playful, that it would have inevitably reminded me of Bernie. In any case, he and I once played it, beginning to end, at one of my school assemblies. Bernie looked great that day as he played the orchestral part. His hair was perfect, with a cool kind of Clark Kent curl in front, courtesy of some gel, I presume. Later in the school hallway, a kid in my class said, "Hey, who was that guy?" That was Bernie, I told him. And then another guy quipped, "Hey, man, what's with the hair? " My response was reflex, quicker than language. I just pounded the punk. No holds barred. I had his back to the floor, my knees on his chest, and was playing his skull like that set of wood blocks in the basement when the teachers pulled me off and hauled me to the principal's office. "I don't get it," the principal said. "One minute you're playing Haydn like an angel and the next you're in a fistfight. What gives?" He was talking about Bernie, I explained. Nobody talks about Bernie. What I meant—and what I realized then for the first time—was that I truly loved Bernie, loved this gentle man like a father. And you know how that is: You can say what you want about me —hey, anything—but when you start bringing family into it you're asking for a world of hurt.

At some level, I'd like to think this feeling of mine—that Bernie is family—makes me unique. But it's ultimately more comforting to know that Bernie has played this role for people like me a hundred times over. I could see it this Christmas at the open-house—the first occasion, I believe, that all three of those beautiful Shaak daughters and their families, including those three beautiful grandchildren, were home in Denver at the same time. When his students approach him, they don't observe the personal space they accord teachers and other adults they regard as "authority figures." Bernie is a man of hugs, not handshakes, a man of grace and hospitality who is always smiling, always arched slightly backward with the force of his own laughter. He welcomes you in and you go to him. Whether you are five years old, or fifteen, or twenty-five, you take hold of his forearm when you talk to him, because you can, because he lets you, and because he wants you to. When he speaks, when he tells his wonderful stories, he taps you on your shoulder, brings you in, let's you know that you matter, and that he listens to you.

Think about that. This is the kind of man you want as your piano teacher—someone who not only feels like a father, but a shrink. Someone who offers you a comforting feeling of confidentiality, a feeling that there is no shame in imperfection. How many piano students can say that about their teachers? How many can say that they never came to their lessons nervous or self-conscious? This kind of grace was never a teaching strategy; it was a natural extension of his personality.

Here's an example. That fourth Ballade again. What a beast. You see, I stopped playing for a time. Eight years, actually. And then about five years ago, I was walking down a city street on a fine spring day and heard strains of Chopin—who else?—coming from an open window. Impulsively, I bought a piano I couldn't afford, got it shipped that very afternoon, then got Bernie on the horn. We talked about repertoire. I said, "Hey, how 'bout that F minor Ballade?" Bernie took on a reverential tone and explained that one does not merely play the F Minor—one has a "relationship" with it. "Kids," he said, are always taking it on before they're ready, starting a lifelong relationship, irreversibly, on the wrong foot. Such a provocative thing to say about a piece of music, isn't it? Bernie said to practice hard on some other things and then come talk to him. I said, Okay—when? He said, "Five years."

I waited three. Then spent the better part of a year learning the thing. Like I said, a beast. And then, when I came back to Denver at Christmastime: The end point, the lesson. It had been nearly thirteen years since my last lesson with the Man. And for the first and last time I can remember with regard to Bernie, I was nervous, nervous, nervous. Nervous not only about playing for him, but also about all those other expert ears around the house. Not only was there Carolyn to contend with, but Jamie and Leslie were home for the holidays, too. (Kim was off in India.) I'd be the only player in the building who hadn't mastered the F-minor—and that's understating it.

And what do you know? During the four hours—count 'em, four hours—we were in the studio, the three women were "gone" for the afternoon. Do you think that was a coincidence? Do you think the Bernie antennae hadn't picked up the nervous vibe in the air? I can't tell you how grateful I was—and am—for that gesture. This is the sensitivity of Bernie. This is the content of his character.

I am reminded now of something Bernie told me some 20 years ago about performing a large work: that in the heightened moments before finger strikes ivory, one must recede into a private space in which the roaring entirety of the music can be gathered and envisioned all at once, as if in tranquil recollection. I wish I could do the same thing with Bernie—sum him up, communicate what he is with words, conjure him somehow. But I can't. He's just too big. So I will end here. My lovely friend and mentor Bernie is gone. But I will take with me as consolation that subtle nod he always gave just before I took the stage—his calm, complete confidence in me. That look to me is Bernie, for whom I am so grateful; he will always represent to me the sweetest and most thrilling part of my childhood.

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